Presently Porter has 4 operating passenger aircraft planes, and they’re apparently operating at money-making levels even though not at optimum levels. There’s ample evidence already, although largely anecdotal, that the noise/pollution impacts on people near and around the airport are significant enough to cause marked spikes in noise complaints at the island airport and a flurry of letters to various media outlets including this discussion board. And farther beyond, a casual walk along the central waterfront in late afternoon is quite noticeably and regularly interrupted by annoying take-off/landing events occurring at least every 30 minutes which I suspect is the peak time for such events. And since Porter is continually announcing new routes and its stated intent is to have 18 aircraft operational by year end, it’s inevitable that that 30 minutes is going to get shorter, and the peak time hours longer.

I figure that the average turn around time for one of these Porter aircraft to fly from say
Toronto to Chicago and back is 3 hours. Add another 4 hours (which is pretty generous) for discharging/recharging passengers, refueling etc, turnaround time altogether will be 7 hours. That translates to 2 take-off/landings at the island airport per aircraft for each turnaround trip. In a given day, with 16 daily operating hours (7am -11pm) practically speaking each aircraft should be able to complete two round trips daily to any number of destinations within about the same radius with time to spare. In other words we’re looking at 4 take-off/landing events per aircraft per day at the island airport.

Okay, so what does this tell us about what we can expect with the current 4 operating aircraft increased to 18? … it will mean about 70 take-off/landings daily. Porter will not likely achieve it right away, but sure as hell they will certainly strive for this or better.

Air traffic fluctuates throughout the day of course with peak hours occurring generally between 7 to 10 in the morning and 4 and 7 in the late afternoon/early evening when say some 70% of all daily take-off/landings occur. The results (the arithmetic is straight forward) which I contend are pretty conservative show that we can expect aircraft taking-off/landings occurring at an alarming frequency of at least EVERY 10 MINUTES through a total of 6 hours during peak periods each and every day!

We’re about to enter entirely new undiscovered country folks … an unprecedented significant quantum jump in disruptive activity at the airport in terms of noise and pollution, and it most certainly will be felt dramatically across a far wider radius of waterfront residencies and the Toronto islands than experienced currently or anytime in the past. And we haven’t considered here the run-up and engine stress testing noise in off hours that will jump up exponentially as the number of aircraft going through this routine increases 4-fold ... but that’s another sad story!

David Wilson